Help centre
Answers before a ticket.
How to connect, route, bill and settle on PacketExchange, answered in plain terms. Cannot find it here? Open a ticket and we reply by email.
Connect
Get traffic flowing
Accounts, credentials, trunks and the first call.
How do I connect, and where do the trunk details come from?
SIP trunks for voice, SMPP binds or the REST API for SMS. Credentials are issued the moment you buy a route and are live on our edge within a minute.
- SIP auth
- IP whitelist, or username and password (digest, no REGISTER needed).
- SMS
- An SMPP bind, or POST /comms/sms with an API key.
- Codecs
- G.711 and G.729.
- The full detail
- Interconnection reference
How fast can I go live?
Minutes. Open an account, take your API key, top up, and send your first call or SMS. No sales call, no contract.
- Smallest top-up
- $5 by card or crypto, $100 by wire.
- Try it first
- Test keys run a request through routing and pricing without delivering anything. An invite code can add up to $50 of test credit.
Do I have to buy a route before I can make calls?
No. You need termination, and it can come from the marketplace or from a carrier you contract yourself.
- From the marketplace
- Buy a listed route and send over it.
- From your own carrier
- List them as a private route on your own account and send over it directly. No purchase involved.
- Who can see a private route
- Only you, plus anyone you choose to share it with. It never appears on the public marketplace.
- How we pick one
- Your own routes and your purchases are treated exactly the same when we choose a route for a call.
Does a caller ID have to be a number I bought from you?
No. Any valid E.164 caller ID is accepted by default, so you can build and test the call path before buying a single number.
- Buying US voice routes
- Needs a completed STIR/SHAKEN compliance profile, and the purchase is reviewed before it goes live.
- Restricted trunks
- A Switch operator can limit which caller IDs a trunk may present.
- What carriers do
- They may reject caller IDs they do not recognise, so a real, reachable number performs better than an invented one.
- What buying numbers is for
- Giving each customer an identity and somewhere to receive calls. Not permission to dial out.
Can I send one-time codes by voice call as well as SMS?
Yes. The Verify API creates the code, sends it by text or by a call that reads the digits aloud, and checks what the user types. Only a hash of the code is stored.
- Endpoints
POST /verify/start · POST /verify/check- Voice languages
- English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Hindi.
- More detail
- Verification
What delivery status do I get for an SMS?
The send-time result first: accepted by the route, or failed with the reason. Where the route returns a carrier delivery receipt, the message then moves to delivered or failed (a failed message is refunded); on routes that return none it stays sent. GET /comms/sms/{id} shows the timeline.
Which numbers can send and receive SMS?
The number catalogue does not flag SMS support per number yet. If you need a number for texting, ask support before you buy.
- What upstream tells us
- The number type only, such as Local, National, Mobile or Toll-free.
- Why we do not infer it
- A guess could have you buy a number that cannot text.
- When it changes
- Per-number SMS capability will appear in the catalogue rather than being inferred.
Route
Choose where traffic goes
Which route carries a call, and whose carrier is behind it.
Is a problem on your side or mine?
Check the status page first. Every service, from voice termination and SMS to the API and payments, is probed each minute and published with 90 days of history and any open incident.
- Live status
- packetexchange.io/status
- Get told
- Subscribe on the status page for an email when an incident opens, changes or resolves.
Why does a route show two prices?
Some carriers price a call by where it comes from, judged by the caller ID it presents. A seller with such a carrier lists two prices: a lower one for calls with an EEA caller ID, and the International price for every other call.
- What counts as EEA
- A valid number from one of the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway.
- Which caller ID is judged
- The one the seller receives, after any caller ID rewrite on your trunk or a fixed caller ID on the listing. It goes in both the From and the P-Asserted-Identity header.
- No caller ID, or an invalid one
- Pays the International price.
- Where you see it
- On the route, before you connect, and on every call record: "EEA caller ID rate" or "International rate".
- EEA caller IDs only
- A few routes carry only calls with an EEA caller ID. Other calls go to your next route.
How is route quality shown?
Every route lists the ASR, ACD and PDD its seller states, next to our Exchange Score: a 1-100 rating we calculate from those stated figures and the route's tier once it has carried traffic, so you can weigh quality as well as price.
I have my own carrier. Do I list it, or just use it?
Either, and you can do both. Same carrier, two jobs.
- As a marketplace route
- Listed for sale. Other buyers can purchase it, so other people’s traffic earns you money.
- As a private supplier
- Added on your Switch. Only your own traffic goes to it, and it just carries yours.
- Who sees a supplier
- Nobody. Adding a carrier as a supplier does not expose it to anyone.
I am selling a route. Which IPs do I allow on my switch?
Every call to you comes from PacketExchange, never from the buyer, so you allow our addresses once and every buyer can reach you. Allow all of them, for signalling and for media.
- Where to find them
- On the Endpoint step when you list a route, on every route’s page, and under Our IPs on My routes. We also email them the first time a listing on a new endpoint goes public.
- Check it worked
- Test my endpoint, on the same screens, sends a real test call from every address and says whether your switch answered, did not answer, or refused us.
- Selling SMS
- Your SMS platform allows one address instead. It is on the Endpoint step of an SMS listing, with a bind test for SMPP.
- Not the buyer address
- Buyers point their trunks at a different address. Never enter ours as your own endpoint: that field is your switch.
Firewall allow-list
Allow our IPs on your switch
Every call reaches you from PacketExchange, never from the buyer. Allow all of these addresses, for signalling and for media.
- Addresses
144.76.120.84138.201.81.168
- SIP signalling
- UDP and TCP 5060
- RTP media
- UDP 16384-32768 from the same addresses
Calls are shared across the addresses, so allowing only one makes about half of them fail.
Bill
What it costs, what you charge
Our price to you, and your price to your own users.
Do developers pay more than carriers?
No. Both draw from the same wholesale market at the same rates. The platform fee depends on how traffic reaches us, not on who you are.
- Via the API or Dialer
- 2% of the route rate, capped at $0.001.
- Over your own SIP trunk
- 0.5% of the route rate, capped at $0.001.
Can I bring my own app and bill my users through you?
Yes. Create sub-accounts for your users and set your own retail price above the wholesale rate.
- Every call or message
- Bills the sub-account at retail.
- Your margin
- Credited to you automatically.
- Your users
- Never see our rates.
Two operational questions come with sub-accounts: how a call is attributed to a customer, and where its SIP password comes from. Both are in troubleshooting.
Settle
Money in, money out
Balances, CDRs and margin, on both sides of the book.
Can I sell and buy at the same time?
Yes. Most operators do both: buying termination for their own app on one destination while selling their own routes on another.
- Tracked separately
- Balances, CDRs and margin, for each side.
- Not duplicated
- The same account does both, without a second login.
Prepaid balances, platform fees and settlement on delivery are set out in developer pricing.
References
The full detail, when you need it.
- Developer docs hubConnecting, first builds, the interconnection and allow-address reference, and links into the REST, MCP and Switch API references.
- REST API referenceEndpoints, auth and examples for programmatic trading.
- MCP serverAI-native, agent-ready route discovery and trading.
- API keys (sign in)Create, rotate and scope keys from your dashboard; signing in is required. Not registered yet? Authentication is covered in the REST reference.
Not in here?
Someone on our team reads every message. Send the detail and we reply by email. Our team works across time zones; for larger deployments we can arrange round-the-clock cover.